The way language as a human faculty has evolved is a question that preoccupies researchers from a wide spread of disciplines. In this book, a team of writers has been brought together to examine the evolution of language from a variety of such standpoints, including language's genetic basis, the anthropological context of its appearance, its formal structure, its relation to systems of cognition and thought, as well as its possible evolutionary antecedents. The book includes Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch's seminal and (...) provocative essay on the subject, 'The Faculty of Language,' and charts the progress of research in this active and highly controversial field since its publication in 2002. This timely volume will be welcomed by researchers and students in a number of disciplines, including linguistics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

One of the most experimentally studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., 99% of the objects in the domain of quantification fall under it, a conclusion that clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier (...) meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment. (shrink)